Every year at Walt Disney World, incredible life-size gingerbread houses are showcased that are made out of real sweets. They are culinary masterpieces guests marvel at year after year, but a thought that has surely crossed the minds of many over the years is this: who are the lucky people who get to live a Hansel and Gretel fantasy and eat the contents of the houses? We finally have the answer to that question, and it's sweet as honey.
The wild truth was shared on Disney Parks official TikTok via a video that spills the unbelievable reality. For the past decade, Disney’s chefs have a detailed process that involves feeding its gingerbread houses to the bees of Florida. Check it out:
@disneyparks ♬ original sound - Disney Parks
As one Disney su chef shared in the TikTok, when the holidays are over at Walt Disney World Resort, they break down every piece of cookie, candy and chocolate, and send the remainder of their gingerbread houses to their tree farms where local Florida bees feast on the displays. According to the video, the recycling move allows Disney to help curb bees' declining population, especially during the winter months when food for the pollinators are tougher to come by.
It’s seriously an insane answer to the ‘who eats the Disney gingerbread houses?’ question, but it’s nice to hear that Disney is recycling and providing food to bees. Once the bees have had their feast, the Disney crew uses the displays for a whole new spruce to the homes and the cycle continues in January.
How did this all start? Barry Stockwell, who is a planned work specialist at Disney, shared this with the Disney Parks blog:
Ten years ago, when performing our annual gingerbread display cleaning, we noticed bees were very attracted to the sugar on the displays after deconstruction. We decided to bring the display pieces to our Disney tree farm and lay them out in our field to give the bees a chance to collect the sugar on the wooden structures.
According to the blog post, keeping the local bees well fed off sugar actually helps local farmers produce honey to harvest and sell to markets, including those that will go back into gingerbread houses. Someone cue “Circle of Life,” because the process actually has a cycle of nature feeling to it that can be hard to come by when it comes to both recycling man-made materials and helping animals.
Now that the holidays are over, Disney guests can likely expect less crowds and get ready for some exciting additions to the parks, including the upcoming Star Wars hotel and the Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster called Cosmic Rewind. We’ll keep you posted here on CinemaBlend with more Disney Parks news.
